1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a liquid container containing a liquid to be supplied to a liquid-consuming device and to a liquid-consuming device equipped with such a liquid container.
2. Description of the Related Art
One known structure of the liquid container includes a liquid chamber having a flexible member as its one part. In this liquid container, decreasing a liquid contained in the liquid container changes the bent state of the flexible member to reduce the inner capacity of the liquid chamber.
Another known structure of the liquid container has a prism used for detection of the remaining volume of a liquid contained in the liquid container. This liquid container is connected with an externally located photo interrupter to detect the reflection state of light by the prism and thereby detect the remaining volume of the liquid in the liquid container.
This prior art liquid container, however, fails to detect the remaining volume of the liquid with high accuracy, because of the reason stated below.
In this prior art liquid container, the flexible member has no uniform but varying change of the bent state, which results in changing the inner capacity of the liquid chamber. The prism located at a fixed position enables detection of a liquid level but does not assure highly accurate detection of a decrease in inner capacity of the liquid chamber to or below a preset level. This leads to failed detection of the remaining volume of the liquid in the liquid container with high accuracy.